Lockdown

15/08/2011

In case you haven't noticed, everyone in the world seems to have a theory as to the reasons for the riots in London and a bit elsewhere last week. He blames the schools! She blames the parents! Someone else blames the Government's cuts! Someone else, the welfare state!

There's one scapegoat, though, everyone can agree on: social media. It's generally accepted that social media, and particularly BlackBerry Messenger, helped organise last week's disturbances and meant they spread far faster than they would have otherwise.

There's two things the Government wants. One is to be able to track down who's posting riot-related material on sites. That's pretty easy on Facebook, which uses people's real names, but hard on Twitter, which doesn't - and nearly impossible on BBM, on which messages are private and encrypted so even the police can't see them.